[Blog post author here]

It never went away. I've had my main blog there since 2002 and tech one since 2006. It works, it's free. I don't have a paid account and never have, and I do not see the problems people mention because I have a working ad-blocker.

I am sorry for those who don't.

Among other things, it used to be fairly widely employed by Russian-speaking users until the government crackdown and mass comment spam in the mid-2010s. Essentially, the older generation skipped Wordpress, Blogger, MySpace, Google+, and many others and went from LiveJournal straight to Facebook and later to Telegram (the younger generation went from VK to Telegram).